Shepherd, an insurance technology platform for commercial industries, has successfully closed a $42 million Series B funding round, led by Intact Private Capital, with participation from Spark Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and additional investors.
The new capital aims to support team expansion, driven by the escalating demand for quicker and more precise underwriting solutions within construction and other sectors heavily reliant on physical assets.
The company, an AI-powered insurance platform for builders and operators founded in 2021, has grown nearly 7x over the past 24 months, and has now raised $67 million to date.
It insures over $400 billion in project value across more than 1,500 policies for 600+ customers — including the physical infrastructure behind the most recognized names in AI. The company’s clients include the leading AI labs, chip manufacturers, hyperscalers, general contractors, specialty builders, and energy developers constructing the facilities that form the physical foundation of the AI economy.
In the early 2020s, commercial insurance entered its harder markets in decades, with sharply rising premiums due to broad rate increases, rather than targeted adjustments.
At the same time, there has been a surge in US infrastructure and data centre investment – hundreds of billions in the last five years and trillions projected -, projects that need to be built and insured.
But the traditional carrier model was not designed for the speed of these projects, which have exposed how poorly legacy insurance systems handle modern rapid development.
Justin Levine, CEO and Co-Founder of Shepherd, said: “The AI race moved from the cloud to the construction site. Every GPU cluster needs a building. Every building needs to be constructed. Every data center requires dedicated power. And the insurance market that is supposed to keep those projects moving has been operating the same way for decades.
“We built Shepherd because we believed the old approach to commercial underwriting needed to change fundamentally — not just get faster, but get smarter. That is why the biggest names in AI infrastructure are choosing us.”
Shepherd was built to solve the issue of long wait times and inconsistent underwriting outcomes, the firm stats.
Its AI technology performs the same workflows in seconds, reducing underwriting feedback from weeks to hours. The platform also integrates real-time data from partners, like Procore and Autodesk, into underwriting, which allows them to assess risk faster than traditional carriers who use static applications.
Shepherd sees the project as it actually is being delivered: incident tracking, quality inspection rates, document management, and jobsite conditions updated continuously.
With these partnerships, data, and AI platform, it can offer differentiated pricing for insureds through their unique Shepherd Savings program – which uses actual construction technology adoption and jobsite data to reward builders who invest in safety and operational excellence.
Shepherd insures the physical infrastructure for leading AI and technology companies building data centres, semiconductor facilities, and energy assets; and it is chosen by clients for its faster, more precise, and less frictional underwriting in a competitive market, the firm highlights.
Shepherd is pursuing what the company describes as the most ambitious technical vision in commercial insurance: fully autonomous underwriting.
“We believe the future of commercial insurance is behavior-based,” said Levine. “The contractors who invest in technology to build safer and smarter should be rewarded for it, not priced the same as everyone else.”
The company envisions a shift from manual processes to an AI-driven future where the complete workflow is managed by artificial intelligence, allowing underwriters to transition from data-entry roles to acting as workflow orchestrators.
“We mapped the same autonomy trajectory that transformed self-driving vehicles and applied it to underwriting,” said Mo Mahallawy, CTO and Co-Founder of Shepherd. “Today, an underwriter manually processes about 20 accounts a month and wastes significant time on submissions that are outside their appetite. In our model, an underwriter will oversee 200. AI handles intake, data enrichment, risk analysis, and pricing. The underwriter sets strategy, manages exceptions, and focuses on the accounts that matter most.”
Shepherd is on a two-year path toward supervised autonomy where underwriters become portfolio orchestrators rather than processors, achieving a 10x increase in capacity.
“We are closing in on the first fully agentic submission in commercial insurance,” said Mahallawy. “Email in, price out. No human intervention until the last mile. No other commercial carrier can make that claim. A year from now, commercial underwriting will be unrecognizable.”
